Study Finds a Quarter of Bosses Hoped RTO Would Make Employees Quit (theregister.com) 76
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A study claims to have proof of what some have suspected: return to office mandates are just back-channel layoffs and post-COVID work culture is making everyone miserable. HR software biz BambooHR surveyed more than 1,500 employees, a third of whom work in HR. The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out -- a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving. While that statistic essentially admits the quiet part out loud, there was some merit to that belief. People did quit when RTO mandates were enforced at many of the largest companies, but it wasn't enough, the study reports.
More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found. Nearly the same number thought their management wanted employees back in the office to monitor them more closely. The end result has been the growth of a different office culture, one that's even more performative, suspicious, and divisive than before the COVID pandemic, the study concludes. According to the report, most employees working remotely and in-person both feel the need to demonstrate productivity, which for more than a third of employees means being seen socializing and moving around the office. That intense need to be visible may actually be harming productivity, study author and BambooHR's own head of HR Anita Grantham concluded in her findings. A full 42 percent of employees who responded to the Bamboo survey said they show up solely to be seen by bosses and managers. If bosses think their presence in the office is making any difference to the amount of work getting done, the results indicate that's not the case.
Remote employees and in-office employees both report spending around two hours of every day not working. Those in-office ones, of course, are probably spending those ten hours a week looking as busy as possible. Away from the office, employees feel the need to demonstrate presence by being hyper-available and never going offline -- the so-called "green status effect," the data suggests. "The distrusting and performative cultures some companies are cultivating are harmful to bottom-line growth," Grantham said, adding that RTO policies are okay, but not if they don't consider individual employee needs. "The conversation around work modes is one of the most important things to address and get clear on as a business," Grantham said. "It often gets reduced to just RTO, but it's actually a much bigger conversation."
More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found. Nearly the same number thought their management wanted employees back in the office to monitor them more closely. The end result has been the growth of a different office culture, one that's even more performative, suspicious, and divisive than before the COVID pandemic, the study concludes. According to the report, most employees working remotely and in-person both feel the need to demonstrate productivity, which for more than a third of employees means being seen socializing and moving around the office. That intense need to be visible may actually be harming productivity, study author and BambooHR's own head of HR Anita Grantham concluded in her findings. A full 42 percent of employees who responded to the Bamboo survey said they show up solely to be seen by bosses and managers. If bosses think their presence in the office is making any difference to the amount of work getting done, the results indicate that's not the case.
Remote employees and in-office employees both report spending around two hours of every day not working. Those in-office ones, of course, are probably spending those ten hours a week looking as busy as possible. Away from the office, employees feel the need to demonstrate presence by being hyper-available and never going offline -- the so-called "green status effect," the data suggests. "The distrusting and performative cultures some companies are cultivating are harmful to bottom-line growth," Grantham said, adding that RTO policies are okay, but not if they don't consider individual employee needs. "The conversation around work modes is one of the most important things to address and get clear on as a business," Grantham said. "It often gets reduced to just RTO, but it's actually a much bigger conversation."
Makes me want to quit (Score:5, Informative)
All these dupes on Slashdot.
Re: You could apply for a job at ./ instead of win (Score:2)
If people are actually getting paid to do the job they're doing now, then the whole thing is even more dysfunctional than we thought.
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Slashdot wouldn't be Slashdot without dupes. It's a historical tradition at this point. Enjoy them: you'd miss the real Slashdot without them.
Re:Makes me want to quit (Score:5, Insightful)
The real slashdot walked out the door with Cmdr Taco.
This is just slashdot's interface.
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Slashdot wouldn't be Slashdot without dupes. It's a historical tradition at this point. Enjoy them: you'd miss the real Slashdot without them.
I'd certainly miss complaining about them!
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The editors are protesting RTO.
Re: Makes me want to quit (Score:3)
Would be next level if we managed to repost all our originals as to make the replies, points and quotations identical to the original, too.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/4... [slashdot.org]
Leaders need an external thing to blame failure on (Score:3)
Corporate leaders need an external force to blame failure and poor performance on. "Given the recession, sales were better than expected, down 1% with earnings down 0.5%"
Corporate leaders also need an external narrative to divert attention from lackluster performance: "And for the 743rd time in the quarterly earnings call, we're using AI"
Retired (Score:3, Interesting)
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Wowza...
I live in Los Angeles and, according to Google, the average rent is $2,105 per month. Now, Los Angeles is pretty large geographically speaking, and there are some super high rents and some very low rents... each representing places you'd want to, or not want to, live. This is 39% higher than the national average rent price of $1,518/month. Also according to Google, the average rent for an apartment in Boston is $3,842.
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are those prices for just the municipality of Boston, or for the entire metro area?
Or for the portion of the metro area served by adequate mass transit?
Re:Retired (Score:4)
P.S. Congratulations on your retirement. :-)
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So, you could not find anything intelligent to say.
Study Finds 100% of Slashdotters Wish Editors Quit (Score:1)
Firing people is extremely expensive (Score:2)
And corporates loves money and dislike responsibility.
Easiest way to reduce your workforce is to make them miserable. They walk, you don't have to pay them anything.
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And corporates loves money and dislike responsibility.
Easiest way to reduce your workforce is to make them miserable. They walk, you don't have to pay them anything.
You should probably take a closer look at where Right to Work laws are in place. Also known as Right to Fire. Or Right to Quit.
They make firing someone as cheap and easy as not liking the color shoes they wore to work that day. Literally.
Re: Firing people is extremely expensive (Score:2)
You should probably look into unemployment insurance laws. You quit, you don't get.
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After a while, doesn't your place of work change? If you're WFH for a few years your lifestyle adjusts and asking you to return to office is a change, one that should be easy to argue is unreasonable.
I think it would be more redundancy rather than quitting if your employer behaves that way.
Enforcing office presenteeism is massively reducing scope to hiring talent. Is it just telling subordinates that "they're vigorously hiring, but unable to find anyone, so pull your socks up, it'll get better". In effect,
And what does RTO stand for? (Score:2)
And why should I care? If an acronym is going to be used in an article (or even an excerpt) then please, for the love of god, tell us what it stands for.
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the following sentences in the summary talks about COVID, so i'm guessing, "return to office".
Re: And what does RTO stand for? (Score:1)
https://www.veeam.com/blog/rec... [veeam.com]
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Re:And what does RTO stand for? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see the issue.
There are pluses and minuses for every job. If your minuses are higher than your pluses at any job then just find a new job you like more.
You don't control your employer. You do control whether or not you work for an employer you don't like.
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Re:And what does RTO stand for? (Score:4, Insightful)
So what? They changed the deal? Don't like the new one?
Quit and get a new job.
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Since people are calling for the WWE to ban the RKO, Randy Orton needs a new finisher, so he turned to the RTO.
That's a questionable strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean typically, if you want to fire people, you want to fire the less productive ones and keep the more productive. Trying to make your employees quit essentially means that those employees who can find a new job quickly will quit first. Essentially you are lowering the productivity of your work force.
Re:That's a questionable strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean typically, if you want to fire people, you want to fire the less productive ones and keep the more productive. Trying to make your employees quit essentially means that those employees who can find a new job quickly will quit first. Essentially you are lowering the productivity of your work force.
The thing is, that's also what happens when you do layoffs. Even if you get rid of only the least productive employees, the impact on morale still tends to be significant, and that tends to result in a second round of departures that consist mostly of the people with the most mobility, who are usually the ones you most want to keep. There's really no good strategy for dealing with a situation where you have over-hired other than imposing a hiring freeze (and sticking to it) and then allowing attrition to naturally reduce headcount over time.
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I mean typically, if you want to fire people, you want to fire the less productive ones and keep the more productive. Trying to make your employees quit essentially means that those employees who can find a new job quickly will quit first. Essentially you are lowering the productivity of your work force.
The thing is, that's also what happens when you do layoffs. Even if you get rid of only the least productive employees, the impact on morale still tends to be significant, and that tends to result in a second round of departures that consist mostly of the people with the most mobility, who are usually the ones you most want to keep. There's really no good strategy for dealing with a situation where you have over-hired other than imposing a hiring freeze (and sticking to it) and then allowing attrition to naturally reduce headcount over time.
The harsh reality of ALL of this in America, is every business leader of every public company being desperate to tell every lie possible about the not-a-recession economy, because stock price. Greedy lying fucks will do anything to delusion and sustain bullshit value. The same bullshit value in “commercial” real estate prices pushing RTO in the face of a planet attacking every tailpipe.
Stop fucking lying and just say it already Biden. We ARE in a recession. And the more you fight and deny it, the greater our chances are of turning it into a full blown Depression. So exhausted over the fucking politics that wants to re-define failure rather than admit it.
You obviously do not understand what a Depression means. The reality is that the US economy is not even in recession. Why let reality intrude in your fantasies?
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Now I'm wondering what the "GDP" of middle class America would graph as.
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We ARE in a recession. And the more you fight and deny it, the greater our chances are of turning it into a full blown Depression. So exhausted over the fucking politics that wants to re-define failure rather than admit it.
Tell me you have no idea what you are talking about, without telling me. You are so hell bent on driving your political agenda you'll say or do anything to make the current guy look bad. When you have to lie to win, it's time to reevaluate your platform, party, and agenda. Alternative fact and all.
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Being in a "recession" isn't a feeling. There are agreed upon indicators, and we haven't hit those numbers.
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Stop fucking lying and just say it already Biden. We ARE in a recession. And the more you fight and deny it, the greater our chances are of turning it into a full blown Depression. So exhausted over the fucking politics that wants to re-define failure rather than admit it.
You have a very different definition of "recession" than economists, apparently. The GDP is still growing. A recession pretty much requires a contraction, hence "recede", meaning to pull back or withdraw. Here's a handy graph of where we are recession-wise. [stlouisfed.org]
The last recession was in 2020, during the last year of the Trump presidency, largely because of COVID. Before that, the last recession started right around the end of George W. Bush's term in office. Before that, the last recession started right aro
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Yes, but when's the last time that you saw "productivity" as a KPI for a top-level manager?
No, headcount matters, revenue matters, customer numbers matter, stock price matters. Productivity? Pfft. Where are you living? In the 20th century or something?
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At big corporations there is no such thing as "more productive" people or any such similar concept.
You are a box on an org chart and a number in a spreadsheet. Nothing more. You are not important. No one is.
If you want to be valued as at a company you have 2 choices: start your own company or be a top performer at a startup. Otherwise you're nobody.
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How are you anything other than a number on a spreadsheet running your own company or working at a startup. If you run your own company, you tend to not exist because you underpay yourself and overwork yourself. If you work for a startup, you are hoping management will reward your effort.
So no, running your own company or working for a startup does not guarantee you will be valued.
retarded (Score:1)
Re: retarded (Score:1)
Gone. Forever. (Score:2)
2019 normal is gone. Forever.
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For sure. The summary says that 75% of managers didn't want their employees to quit with Return To Office. They just wanted their employees back in the office so things could go back to the 2019 normal.
2019 normal? Are you sure that’s the reason?
Are you sure it couldn’t possibly be the thousands of overpriced middle-earth-management cube farmers desperate to justify their entire corporate existence again by forcing a planet to give any Go-Green initiative the middle in favor of pushing millions of tailpipes to start polluting like 2019 again, all in order to justify the equally overpriced dirt that happens to be priced at “commercial” rates that need to be corruptly sustained with
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In a company where they have to start firing a significant portion of the workforce because of shit performance of the business, the best people are going to walk anyway. Only difference between them quitting and you firing them is the severance payment.
Well yes (Score:2)
Some companies have perfected the art of the dick move - making work suck to force some employees to quit instead of paying severance.
Yahoo and IBM examples of companies that have both done it. The problem with that strategy is that all the people with in-demand, transferable skills will quit and the company is left with the deadwood and lifers who'll cling to their jobs like limpets no matter what BS the company throws their way. So yes in the short term, it cuts head count, but those heads that remain are
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The problem with that strategy is that all the people with in-demand, transferable skills will quit and the company is left with the deadwood and lifers who'll cling to their jobs like limpets no matter what BS the company throws their way. So yes in the short term, it cuts head count, but those heads that remain are not necessarily the heads the company wanted to retain.
A self-inflicted tale as old as Capitalism itself. At this point, what is there to say to Greed N. Arrogance losing valued talent involuntarily? I’m gonna go with fuck ‘em if they never learn. Sounds about right. Hell, if retention was their job they would have been fired so long ago the dot-bomb wouldnt have dropped.
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The other problem is people see this coming, so they idle and don't focus on their work or side projects and lose enthusiasm.
Also, I think unless you're in R&D companies don't care about your creativity much, you're just part of a work queue that's mechanical to them, easy to find another chef to work on the tickets. Unless the requirement is non-remote and mostly within a 80km radius.
But I thought the economy was doing gangbusters? (Score:2)
I have been assured by TOP MEN that this was the case.
TOP MEN only want their stock to go up! (Score:2)
TOP MEN only want their stock to go up
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I have been assured by TOP MEN that this was the case.
You have been assured by 81 million votes, that this is how we got here.
Eighty. One. Million.
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Does this mean you're the BOTTOM MAN?
It speaks volumes that people didn’t quit. (Score:1)
All talk and no action. At least in the aggregate. It means there was always room to impose hybrid or full RTO.
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All talk and no action. At least in the aggregate. It means there was always room to impose hybrid or full RTO.
And on the flip side of that argument, RDP enabled room for hybrid or WFH 20+ years and eleventy gazillion metric fucktons of pointless commute tailpipe pollution ago. We still have middle-earth-management cube farmers in 2024 instead.
We should all enjoy the crippling hypocrisy as we RTO to find the first in person meeting, discussing how the company can be more “green”.
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Unless there is a govt regulation mandating remote work to save on carbon emissions, why should an employer care? Even if there is a carbon tax on gasoline, that is another cost for the employee to bear. In the absence, employers will do what is best for them. Which is mostly to have everyone in a couple of days a week minimum, in their view.
Misses the point (Score:2)
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I think you had a point in there somewhere but the wall of text strained my eyes.
Paragraphs, please.
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Below minimim wage labor isn't what's being affected by these policies. Seems like you are taking a story that applies to a lot of offices and narrowing it down to ride sharing companies for some reason.
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That makes people fight to get the easy tasks and avoid the hard to do ones. Anyone who has worked a help desk has seen others take all the super easy tickets to get their daily quota and leave all the hard or time consuming ones for others.
No surprise (Score:2)
We've always known this. The company swings from "everything needs to work at home!" to "everyone within 50 miles of an office needs to be in the office!" (and then they change to 25 miles, 20 miles...). And then back to work from home, and then back to the office. I've lost count of how many times they've changed the rules.
It is just an attempt to shed the workers who don't want to change, without having to pay severance or make up some other excuse to fire them.
No shit Sherlock (Score:3)